


Things Worth Saving

by RoseisaRoseisaRose, soultyghost



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Action/Adventure, Azure Moon Route, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Pre-Timeskip | Academy Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), also everything's on fire, moderate fantasy violence, mostly holding hands and running, some creepy humming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:14:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26270209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseisaRoseisaRose/pseuds/RoseisaRoseisaRose, https://archiveofourown.org/users/soultyghost/pseuds/soultyghost
Summary: As Adrestian troops lay claim to Garreg Mach, the students work quickly to evacuate north. Annette Dominic and Felix Fraldarius have very different priorities for what to take with them before the monastery collapses. Those priorities change when they run afoul of dark mages with covered faces and chilling intentions.Written and illustrated for the 2020 Felannie Minibang. Featuring half a dozen rare swords, a book on turnip farming, a cursed chrysanthemum, and a very doomed stained-glass window.
Relationships: Annette Fantine Dominic/Felix Hugo Fraldarius
Comments: 36
Kudos: 92
Collections: Felannie Mini Bang 2020





	1. Inward

Annette could smell the battlefield smoke even from the center of the monastery.

The Empire’s siege of Garreg Mach had been bloody and brutal; all the Knights of Seiros had barely managed to hold the line as they pushed forward against Edelgard’s elite forces. Annette had lost track of her friends, her comrades, her closest allies as building after building in the surrounding town seemed to go up in smoke around her. Mercedes had run back, away from the front lines, to tend to a wounded soldier who could no longer walk. Ashe had pushed Annette away from a soldier’s lance and screamed at her to run, and she had foolishly, instinctively followed the order. Felix had darted off into the fray without looking back, heedless to the battle formations or his own safety or Annette’s desperate, futile call that he slow down. When Annette had seen Dimitri plunge his lance through Edelgard’s armor, a murderous expression marring his perfect, handsome features, she had been utterly alone. She found herself propped up against an abandoned house and desperately gasping for air after felling three armored units who had thought their lances could outpace her magic. They had been wrong.

She had thought this meant they had won. Dimitri’s swing had been so brutal, almost inhuman, and the look of pain on Edelgard’s face had been unlike anything Annette had seen from her cool and collected former classmate. But the outline of a previously unseen army had appeared on the horizon even as Edelgard drew her troops back to regroup, and the battlefield had dissolved into panicked chaos without the instructions of Dimitri or their professor. The building Annette rested against exploded into flame, a hit from a mage Annette would never see and could not possibly match. As she stumbled away from the smoke and the fire, Annette remembered that a family had lived in that building. Three little girls (were two of them twins?) had played in the front yard and waved at her wildly when she walked by. One had once eagerly pointed at her own hair, in two looped braids, and grinned widely at Annette, her front tooth missing. Annette hoped wherever they had evacuated to was safe and beautiful, and that they would never feel the need to return home to find nothing but hollowed-out ash.

It was Alois who eventually found Annette. She was blindly casting at any figure that looked like an enemy as she tried to make her way back to the main fighting force. His armor was bloodstained and a large gash ran from his temple to his jaw. It was painful to look at him and not see him smile back.

He pushed Annette towards the monastery with his free hand, his axe slung over his shoulder. “Students need to evacuate immediately,” he yelled over the din of the battle. “Leave this to the Knights of Seiros!”

Annette had been about to protest, to point out that the Knights of Seiros could not possibly handle this many approaching soldiers, but Alois was already running way towards a waiting battalion, and her arm was seized by another figure, and Dedue was pulling her away from the battle, as calm and diligent as if he were working in the greenhouse on a weekend afternoon. He kept his hand encircled around her arm as he walked in silence, and Annette was for once grateful that she wasn’t expected to fill the space with conversation.

When they reached the inner gates of the monastery, Dedue dropped her arm, looking down at her with a blank expression that Annette chose to read as concern. “Pack your things and hurry to the east exit,” he said quickly and quietly. “We must leave within the hour. Students are to regroup at the forest edge and make camp at Charon tonight. If you’ll excuse me, Annette, I must tend to his highness’s wounds.” He bowed solemnly, and was gone.

And it wasn't that Annette didn’t take Dedue’s advice seriously, or that she didn’t understand the gravity of the situation. She could hear the sounds of warfare in the distance; the smell of smoke clung to her nose and her hair and her school uniform. But she had meager possessions in her room – sentimental items, true, but Annette had never truly owned anything of great value. And there were things of great value of Garreg Mach. Things that were worth saving. And so she redirected, moving away from the dormitory rooms and hurrying as fast as she could to the second floor of the monastery, her footsteps reverberating eerily in the abandoned hallways. From far away, she could hear the cry of a wyvern, piercing and faint. The battle of Garreg Mach raged on, clinging to Annette as she ran deeper into the monastery.

Annette was not a selfish person. The treasures and artifacts of Garreg Mach did not tempt her personally. But, she thought to herself, pushing open the doors of the library, some things are too precious to leave behind.

She breathed in the smell of old paper and dust, banishing the scents of smoke and blood from her recent memory.

The library at Garreg Mach was unlike anything she had ever seen – it rivaled the library at the palace in Fhirdiad, which she had seen once on a family trip when she was small and once more on a banquet thrown for top students at the School of Sorcery when she was old enough to know what the good books were. It also rivaled the School of Sorcery; although her beloved alma mater had a more extensive tome variety, Garreg Mach’s rare books collection was unparalleled. She knew the rumors that Seteth was confiscating and hiding (she hoped hiding, and not burning) all the truly good material, but Annette had still gotten to hold original manuscripts of the most famous bishop of the ninth century and magical treatises that she had assumed had been lost to time and indifference. Five pages taken from the back corner of Garreg Mach’s library was worth more than the entire contents of Annette’s bedroom. It was an easy decision to make.

Annette scampered to the back corner of the library, settling by a poorly-lit trio of bookshelves. A large metal plaque read RESERVED at the top of each shelf. Not even Hanneman was supposed to take these books out of the library proper, and Annette had heard him arguing the fact quite loudly over the course of her time here. She felt an illogical tremble of guilt as she reached for a text. Surely the librarians would forgive her; it was extraordinary circumstances.

If Annette had all the time in the world, input from her smartest classmates and most trusted mentors, and unlimited snacks, she still wouldn’t have been able to decide which were the most valuable books to save. She had 20 minutes and the inability to reach the top shelf. So she started by picking the titles she remembered being the most excited to read, and quickly managed to pile a stack roughly her height on the floor beside her. Annette frowned, and decided to try to lift the stack anyways. The stack wobbled and Annette wobbled more, and she stood up to survey her work, her hands on her hips and her face twisted in concentration. Maybe she could just get rid of two or three, and take the rest with her. . .

Annette was brought out of her contemplation by the sound of the library doors swinging open, squeaky hinges slowly creaking. She looked up, already preparing an excuse for Seteth or Lysithea or any of the assistant librarians as to why she was standing next to a stack of Garreg Mach’s most valuable manuscripts when she had been told directly by several of her superior officers that she needed to be as far from Garreg Mach as possible, as quickly as possible. But Annette shut her mouth with a stifled cry as her eyes adjusted to the backlit entryway of the library. It wasn’t a librarian standing in the doorway. It wasn’t anyone that Annette had seen at Garreg Mach before, and she knew instantly they shouldn’t be there now.

It was a woman, tall and lithe and clad in dark robes that in the dusty lighting of the library could have been black or navy or deep, deep purple. The robes swept out around her feet, the unnecessary fabric of the skirt a stark contrast to the graceful, careful fit of the low-cut bodice, a variation of the classic warlock’s uniform that Annette would have admired had she not been experiencing abject terror at the moment. A large hat covered her eyes, the swooping brim that reminded Annette of the old fashioned professors at the Royal School of Sorcery. Neither her fond nostalgia for her alma mater nor the ostentatious flower – a chrysanthemum, perhaps? – fastened to the band of the hat made Annette feel better. If anything, such docile and traditional touches seemed jarringly out of place on the woman.

It was difficult to say why; Annette could not make out her features beyond a striking silhouette. But something about the way the woman walked through the library was off. She moved wrong. It felt wrong. When she turned her head slightly towards the far corner where Annette stood, concealed in shadow, Annette stuffed her fist against her mouth to conceal a squeak. The woman appeared not to hear, and continued her slow saunter down the center row of desks, her gait at once too smooth and too disjointed.

Annette wasn’t necessarily the fastest student at Garreg Mach, or the stealthiest. But she also certainly wasn’t the dumbest. And she wasn’t about to wait around to be spotted by some shadowy figure that wasn’t even supposed to be there. Annette left her stack of books and dived behind a set of shelves that created a mini corridor along the rightmost edge of the library, the first in several rows of bookcases that created long, narrow alleys of paper and ink for her to explore. Annette curled up into a ball against a bookcase that was balanced against the wall – more sturdy that way, she figured – tucked her knees to her chest, and prayed the woman would go away once she realized there was nothing valuable to loot. Why Edelgard’s troops were ransacking a _library_ was beyond Annette; there had to be war trophies more valuable to the mighty Adestrian Empire.

She listened to the slow, careful footsteps continuing down the center of the library, separated by only a few feet, some rather shoddily crafted planks of wood, and several thousand words of history and magic. The footsteps did not echo as they might in a cathedral, but each step seemed to reverberate through Annette’s heart, the pace slow and syncopated against her own beating pulse.

She gradually realized there was a second sound, accompanying the footsteps, building to audibility as the woman walked. At first she thought it was a murmur – quiet observations, perhaps, or more worryingly, the incantation of a spell. But Annette quickly realized it was _humming_ – the woman was singing an aimless, wordless tune, meandering in pace and tone, unified only by the minor key and occasional slip into discordant notes. It was a jarring song, one that took delight in wrong turns and denied resolutions. Annette couldn’t follow where it would go next, and at the same time, it sunk into her ears and she feared she would never be able to hear anything else.

Annette buried her face against her knees and wrapped her arms around her head. If she stayed still, and quiet, the woman would take her lap down the main arteries of the library and then leave. Annette tried to focus on someone other than the terrible melody that was echoing off the shelves – quieting her breathing, slowing her heart rate, reciting lyrics of her own cheerier songs, wondering if she should write a song about the library, that would be a nice song, probably. She took a deep breath, and it was too loud. She took another breath, and it was soft, but shallow, and she nearly coughed on it. She could do this. She could breathe. She was going to escape.

“Boo,” said a voice above her. Annette looked up into the woman’s eyes, shining gold and bright from beneath the too-wide brim of her hat.

Annette jerked backwards, throwing her arms out behind her to keep her from falling flat on her back. She pushed back with her legs, scrambling to get away from the woman. Her modified crabwalk was driven by desperation, not strategy. Annette could not possibly outpace this sorceress balanced backwards on all fours, no matter how slow and deliberate her gait was. The heel of Annette’s palm snagged on a carpet edge, sending her arm flying, and she collapsed back on her elbows, staring up at the woman, who barely seemed to have taken steps to match her pace, her flowing and too-long robes giving the strange illusion that she was floating. She floated over to loom above Annette now, peering down at her with a look that was less murderous and more . . . curious.

“Too young to be a librarian, aren’t we?” she said. “Are you one of the students, then? I slipped by plenty of panicked, rounded faces just like yours as I made my way up here.”

“Wh-who,” Annette stuttered, her voice catching before she’d even gotten a proper word out. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“Ah, inquisitive,” the woman said, as if that solved everything. “A student, then.” She pushed back her sleeves, long and bell-shaped, and snapped her fingers together lightly, puffs of purple flame appearing as she did. “I hope your last few months were happy here, little one,” she said softly. “I’m afraid the ending won’t be as nice.”

Annette threw out her hand with a wild scream that ricocheted off the narrow alley of bookcases. She felt energy surging through her as she cast Cutting Gale, the wind sweeping through her body and down her arms and flying from the direct center of her palm, the sure difference between an experienced caster and novice mages, who always relied too much on their fingertips. She felt her limbs, and her heart, and her chest fill with energy, and then more energy, and then too much energy, the frantic adrenaline of using magic with her Crest, pulling her forward into a sitting position, desperate and powerful and uncontrolled. In the dim light of the library, she could see the momentary glow from the inside corner of her wrist, the Crest of Dominic momentarily shining against her skin before fading back to the dull birthmark that she barely even noticed on a day-to-day basis. It made her feel powerful, and unafraid, and she saw this translate into the wild winds that snaked out in front of her, dangerous and sharp and precise.

The spell flung forward directly towards the woman’s face, and her eyes widened slightly. And then she smiled, and as the green light of Cutting Gale dissipated into meaninglessness around her, Annette swore she could see rows of perfect, pointed teeth looking down at her.

The chrysanthemum on her hat stirred lightly in the breeze. Beyond that, Annette’s strongest magic appeared to have done nothing at all.

Still, strangely, the woman broke her connection to the strange purple flame that had been growing between her thumb and forefinger, and it faded into nothingness. She bent down over Annette, one hand resting on her knees and the other reaching forward, her stare ravenous.

“Oh, I _see_ ,” she said, her voice tinged with eager surprise. “You’re one of _those_ students, then.”

Annette leaned back again, instinctively, her heart beating in her ears now, but the woman could move quickly when she put her mind to it. She reached down and snatched Annette by the wrist, yanking her to her feet and holding her hand aloft, stretched above Annette’s head with her palm at the woman’s eye level.

“So this is what they look like,” she murmured softly to herself, running her thumb over Annette’s inner wrist, where the crest of Dominic was recreated in miniature, pale umber against the rest of Annette’s skin.

Annette jerked backwards but the woman held her hand in a vice. Annette lashed out with her free hand, a decent attempt at a punch that her friends had walked her through one afternoon after greenhouse duty. It had seemed that they were teasing her, then, tiny little Annette who would never venture beyond the back line of the battlefield, learning to leave bruises. She wasn’t laughing now. She threw her fist with all she had. The sorceress caught it easily, without looking away from the crest, and threw Annette back against the bookshelf with some force. Annette felt the wind knock out of her as several books clattered to the floor, the bookshelf old and shaky even with the benefit of a supporting wall. Her head spun from the force of impact, but the woman ignored her whimper, pulling her wrist even higher as she traced the outline of the crest.

“Such a curious design – and they manifest naturally, do they not?” she whispered, a trace of that tuneless, discordant hum as she talked to an empty room. “Tell me, child,” she said, in a voice that did not imply she cared what Annette thought. “Does it hurt to have such history moving through your veins? Do you feel broken when you don’t feel its power? Does it call to you in your dreams, or when you fight? Do you wish you could always feel the way you felt just now?”

“Let – let me go,” Annette cried out, not understanding the woman’s questions one bit, still dazed that she was still alive. “I won’t hurt you – you can see I can’t possibly hurt you.”

The woman jerked her eyes from Annette’s wrist to her face, suddenly attaching a person to the hand she held aloft. She smiled softly, to herself, muttering again. “Ah yes, not as much power as you would like, I suppose. Still, you’re young. It grows.” She lowered Annette’s wrist down, her fingers still wrapped around her, and looked down at her. “Cast again. I want to see it,” she said, the command in her tone eerily similar to the orders Byleth snapped in Reason training or on the battlefield – simple, confident, certain of being followed.

“You want to see – you want to see a spell?” Annette asked, confused, but not dead yet, which was more confusing.

“No no, girl, I want to see the light. You get it by casting, do you no? Show me and you buy yourself another moment of breath,” the woman said, in clipped, efficient, impatient tones.

Annette jerked her wrist back to look at her crest, but the woman held firm, not letting her go. “I don’t think you – I can’t control it,” Annette blurted out. “I don’t turn it on and off, it just – it just happened, sometimes.”

The woman blinked at Annette, then looked away, lost in her thoughts again. “Unconscious activation brought on by moments of extreme – yes, of course, that would make the most sense according to – an ingenious mechanism, really, the subject could almost expect a normal lifespan with such measures.” Annette stared at the woman as she muttered, unsure if she was even aware that she was still there. She took a tentative step backwards, prepared to make a wild, sudden dash to the library door and catch the woman by surprise, but before she had a chance to yank her arm loose, the woman snapped her gaze back to Annette at the slight movement.

“Right then,” she said. “In that case, let’s make it happen.”

She slammed Annette’s arm above her head, again, pinning her wrist against the bookshelf. Annette twisted under her own arm, but was pulled up on her tiptoes, unable to get adequate footing to break free or strike back. The sorceress was mumbling to herself again, a string of words in a language Annette couldn’t quite follow, all long vowels and inexplicable consonant combinations.

The pain was concentrated at first, and Annette let out a sharp gasp as a thousand pins seemed to center on her wrist, white-hot and pulsing, the sharp pain of touching a hot stove, but without the shocking few seconds of numbness. She looked up and saw her Crest glowing, bright and piercing in the low light of the library, a perfect representation of the banners and ornaments that littered her family estate. Annette bit her lip to keep from crying out, waiting for the mark to fade and to go back its normal dull tone. But it didn’t fade. The glow continued steadily, reflecting back into the eyes of the sorceress, who laughed greedily, baring her two rows of pointed teeth.

The pain began to spread, snaking down Annette’s arm and towards her heart, a rush of magic in reverse. Annette gasped for air, a breathless, pleading sob escaping as she tried to twist away, but she remained pinned solidly against the thin shelf of BOTANICALS PL – RH, according to the small plaque above her eyes. And then suddenly it was too much – too much air in her lungs, too much blood pumping through her at too rapid a rate, a screaming, ringing in her ears that was not her own voice, but not anyone else’s. Annette gave a final twist, feeling magic pulsing at the ends of her fingertips, frantic and determined. Wind magic shot out of her hand, her fingers, her wrist, a multidirectional burst of energy, and the sorceress momentarily flexed her fingers outward in surprise, giving Annette the space she needed to yank herself free. Annette stumbled backwards, cradling her wrist to her chest and looking up at the woman, realizing too late that she’d missed the window to turn tail and run as the woman turned back to her, snapping her fingers to produce purple flame one more. She stood cast in the shadow of a row of bookcases that stretched well into the library, her eyes once more hidden under her hat, a vicious, almost inhuman silhouette lit only by the dancing purple flames at the edges or her fingers.

“I’ve half a mind to take you with me, little one,” the woman said. Her voice sounded far away and absent, but Annette was trained enough in fighting that she recognized an offensive stance when she saw one – the sorceress was tense and ready to move, ready to strike, at the slightest hint of movement from Annette. She continued on, her voice still dreamlike and airy, “You’re a lot more interesting than these dusty old books. It seems a shame to kill you.”

Annette took a step back without meaning to, bumping into a bookcase behind her, clumsy as ever. A tome on the history of turnip prices from the early 20s fell to the floor with a loud clatter. Annette picked up a book from the shelf and stared at it intently. AGRICULTURE TE-US, the plaque read above her head. The bookshelf wobbled, and steadied, the rest of the books remaining where they were.

The woman tilted her head as she looked at Annette, the sharp angle of her hat giving the allusion that her neck bent to the side with an unnatural sharpness. “Are you trying to learn a last minute spell, then? I suppose that’s one idea – you don’t seem to know anything terribly powerful right now.”

“No,” Annette said slowly. “I think just plain old wind will do for this.”

“For what, little insect?” the woman asked.

“To show you my Crest,” Annette whispered. “Catch.”

She threw the book of Advanced Theories of Crop Rotation directly to the woman, and then flipped her hand over, fingers facing upwards, and yanked backwards with a jerk of her wrist, her fingers catching on an invisible force caught up in the fabric of reality. Loud, hissing wind came rushing from the back corner of the library. Annette was glad she had chosen her most basic wind spell for this; casting from a distance had never been her strong suit. But at least, she mused, her target was inanimate – and easy to hit. The wind spell crashed into the bookcase at the far edge of the parallel rows, sending it teetering forward – slowly, then all at once, crashing into the bookcase next to it, and the bookcase next to _that_ , and finally, the bookcase hovering above the sorceress.

The sorceress evidently had few ambitions for farming, because the book had not distracted her for long. But when she looked up, she made the mistake of looking at Annette, in disgust and confusion. It took her a second too long to turn and see the bookshelf teetering down towards her, books on HISTORIOGRAPHY AG-RT raining down on her before the rickety bookshelf and it’s following fallen friends crashed into her with a sickening crunch.

Annette didn’t wait to see if the mage was still moving – or even still breathing. She broke into a dead run out of the library, leaving her precious rare volumes and valuable manuscripts behind. Her wrist throbbed painfully, so painfully that it made Annette’s knees feel weak and wobbly as she flung herself into the hallway and made a beeline for the stairs. Adrenaline propelled her foreword faster than she thought was possible, even as her legs felt boneless and disjointed, and Annette ran through the halls of Garreg Mach like a broken marionette. It was not a sustainable escape plan – Annette wasn’t sure if her ankles or her lungs would give out first – but she didn’t want to be around when whatever was in that library decided to _leave_ that library, so she told herself that she could rest once she’d gotten down the stairs and into the sunlight and she pushed herself to run faster around the final corner towards the stairwell.

A pile of swords greeted her as she rounded the corner.

Annette drew herself up as she skidded to a stop, magic already lacing down her fingertips in preparation. The spell died mid-cast as she realized two things: one, that casting magic was almost unbearably painful, as if the energy was rising directly out of her wounded wrist; and two, that piles of swords don’t generally grow legs and walk on their own. Annette let out a gasp of pain and surprise, and the walking pile of swords lowered itself enough for her to realize that it was actually Felix Fraldarius, carrying at least a half dozen swords and looking almost guilty as he exited the former quarters of Jeralt Eisner.

“Annette! Shouldn’t you have left by now?” he asked, and before she had time to explain herself, or accuse him of hypocrisy, or even tell him to run, Annette doubled over in a coughing fit so violent she was afraid she might throw up. She threw her hand against the wall beside her and braced, willing the world to stop spinning so that she could start running again. She never wanted to run again in her life, yet her brain still would not stop screaming _run run run run run_ at her.

She heard a clanking of metal by her ear, and she looked up to see Felix leaning down over her, having adjusted his swords so he could lean in closer without whacking her with the flat end of a stray blade. “What’s happened?” he asked her, and the low tones of his voice would have been comforting if he wasn’t speaking so urgently. “Were you injured in the battle? Can you walk?”

Annette opened her mouth to tell him that she had been running perfectly well without his help, thank you very much, and broke into another coughing fit. When she finally pulled herself together enough to speak, she decided sniping at Felix, while usually her favorite hobby, was not a top priority right now. Instead, she stumbled forward towards the stairs, babbling barely comprehensible fragments of orders at him. “She’s in the library” – she coughed – “It’s not safe here” – she her clumsiness finally caught up with her and she pitched forward, tangled on her own two feet – “We have to get _out_ ” – Annette’s words were interrupted by her own sharp cry as she threw her hand out to steady herself against the opposite wall and every nerve ending in her wrist exploded into electrified pain. 

Through the pain, she felt a hand on her opposite elbow, lifting her up just enough to take pressure away from the wall. She looked up into Felix’s eyes for the second time that day, and they flashed, fire and gold, as he frowned at her. He’d somehow managed to cradle all of those damn swords in one arm, pressing them tightly against his chest, and with his free hand he pulled Annette to her feet.

“Okay,” he said, leading her forward. “Listen. If you can’t walk, lean on me. Sylvain went to get horses, you can ride with him.”

“Why do you have so many swords?” Annette finally asked. Her voice was thick; she felt dizzy. Her entire arm was pulsating now, and if it weren’t for Felix’s hand firmly holding her upright by her elbow, she was pretty sure the black spots flashing in front of her eyes would have kept her from moving forward.

“I grabbed them from Captain Eisner’s office; he had a bunch of good stuff in there, I think this one may be one of Zoltan’s apprentices.” Felix misread her panicked look. “What? He’d want the professor to have them. I’ll hand them over once we get to base camp.”

“It’s not that, it’s – I don’t see why you need so many of them,” Annette chided him, taking a few quick steps ahead of him and pulling her elbow to urge him forward. “We need to _move_ , Felix, it’s not safe here.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not the one slowing us down,” Felix said. He winced under her responding glare, and added, “If anyone comes after us, don’t worry. I can run with swords. Just keep walking, we’re almost there.”

He opened the door to the stairwell leading downwards, and three mages in long dark robes and hooked masks stared up at them, already midway up the stairs.

Annette threw a fireball down the stairs without thinking, and it dissipated into thin air before it even got near them. She stumbled backwards, clutching her throbbing wrist, as Felix violently chucked his entire armful of swords down the stairwell, also probably without thinking. Judging by the clatters and protests that echoed off the stairwell walls, he must have hit at least one mysterious mage with his makeshift projectiles. He slammed the door shut and jammed a knife through the door handle, blocking it from opening. (Annette had no idea where the knife appeared from.) He quickly turned back to her.

“New plan; you’re right; I can’t run with swords,” he said, grabbing her hand and breaking into a sprint down the hallway towards the inner sanctum where the Archbishop Rhea generally received visitors. “Let’s go.”

Felix was much faster than Annette even on her good days, and she did not count today among her good days. But he had been thoughtful enough, or perhaps just lucky enough, to grab her uninjured hand, and his fingers tightly intertwined with hers, pulling her along behind him with just enough support to keep her on her feet. Felix threw open the door to the audience chamber and pulled Annette in, slamming the door after them. He dropped her hand and scanned the room for something to barricade the door with, settling on a torch ensconced against the wall. He shoved the torch through the twin door handles, locking them in place, and although the torched threatened to fall at any moment, it might buy them some time. He grabbed Annette again, this time by the wrist, and the two ran deeper into the audience chamber.

The Archbishop’s meeting room was a centerpiece of Garreg Mach, but Annette had rarely been there during her time at the monastery. She had been welcomed by Rhea upon her arrival, as all new students were, and she and Lysithea had been sent to Seteth’s office once for burning down a large section of training grounds in a bout of what he termed “ill-advised magical experimentation.” But beyond that, the place was strange and unfamiliar. It seemed even more foreign to her as their footsteps echoed against the vaulted ceilings, as the room was completely abandoned. Statues of minor heroes of the church stared down at her disapprovingly as Felix pulled her past them, and the entire room was cast in the multicolored light of the large stained-glass window at the end of the hall. Annette found the window mesmerizing – a complicated mural of the most famous deeds of Seiros, done in an array of dazzling colors. The glass seemed to take on an orange tint, and Annette didn’t know if that was from sunset or from the fires that surely raged on outside.

Felix, uninterested in saints or statues or fiery rainbows, cast a wild glance around the room as they came to a halt in front of the Archbishop’s throne. His eyes settled on Seteth’s office, and he yanked Annette after him as he redirected to the side chambers of the room. He slammed the door behind them, and, with a quick flick of the lock, fell back against the door, drawing deep breaths in contrast with Annette’s shallow gasps for air. The only sound was their mismatched breathing for a moment, and then Annette glanced around the room and reached the inevitable conclusion.

“Felix,” she said slowly, and he looked over at her. “There’s no other exit out of this room.”

Felix frowned, and opened his mouth to reply, and closed it, and frowned harder.

“What was the strategy, exactly?” Annette said, her voice rising a little bit. “I assumed you had a strategy.”

Felix glared at her. “Well, the first part of the strategy, Annette, was to keep a bunch of creepy men in dark cloaks from getting near you, because it doesn’t look like you can take much of a hit right now,” he snapped. “And the second part of the strategy was to run, as fast as possible, and as far away as possible.” He looked around the office, full of bookshelves and side tables and couches and centered on a giant desk raised above the rest of the room. “And if you let me think for a second, I’m sure I’ll think of part three,” he added, rather unimpressively.

“Maybe there’s a secret passageway behind a bookshelf,” Annette suggested excitedly. Seteth seemed full of secrets, he probably kept one or two fun ones, like a secret passageway behind a bookshelf.

Felix frowned at the wall of books behind her. “I’m pretty sure that wall faces nothing, Annette,” he said, and Annette resented the implication that he had better spatial reasoning than her, when she was the one who manipulated physical space to cast spells on a daily basis. “Unless you want a secret passage to the roof, I don’t think we’ll have much luck.”

“The roof is better than trapped in a room without an exit,” Annette snapped. “I’d rather be on the roof than stuck here waiting for some creeps in masks and robes to find us.”

“Fine, whatever, the Roof is Plan C,” said Felix sarcastically. “For plan A, though – do you mind helping me move that desk? We could barricade the door for _weeks_ with that thing.”

“Plan A is to wait here for weeks?” Annette said skeptically. “Did you find rations along with all those swords?”

Felix glared at her, but she was too tired and everything hurt and she didn’t really care what he thought of her right now. “No, Annette, I don’t want to stay here any longer than you do. But if we can wait them out, sneak out after dark – they weren’t searching for two academy students, whatever they’re here for.”

“I didn’t think you’d be one to turn down a chance to fight, Felix,” Annette said, sinking down into one of the armchairs that Seteth kept for guests. Felix continued to lean against the door, as if his body would provide a suitable barricade until he could move the furniture effectively. “Hiding doesn’t seem like your style.”

Felix frowned at her. “It’s usually not,” he said. “But I usually fight alone, and believe it or not, I do want you to make it out of here alive.” Annette swallowed hard and looked up at him, hardly daring to breathe, feeling tense as Felix stared at her. He broke eye contact too soon, looking at the floor. “You’d just slow me down in a fight. We have to play it smarter than that.”

Tension snapped; Annette felt her cheeks flush hot with annoyance in its place. “To think I sometimes forget what an uncooperative, uncaring _villain_ you are,” she grumbled. “I can take down just as many soldiers as you can, Felix Fraldarius. I can take down more.”

“Goddess, please don’t,” Felix said. He walked over to where she sat and glanced down at her. “You can barely walk; you shudder every time you cast a spell – don’t think I didn’t notice,” he added before Annette could object. “I don’t _only_ think about myself, you know,” he said. He reached down and flicked a hand directly below her bangs, frowning. Annette felt a jab of pain as he brushed his thumb across a scratch she hadn’t realized was there.

“Could’ve fooled me,” she muttered, waving his hands away.

“I’m just saying, even I know when fighting’s not worth it,” Felix said, not unkindly. “If you want to be helpful, though, you can help me move the desk.”

Annette brushed her hand against the cut across her forehead as he walked away. It stung.

She didn’t have any better ideas – yet – so she followed after him, tripping lightly up the short stairs that elevated Seteth’s writing area from the rest of the office. It was a large, imposing desk, matching the man it belonged to, and Annette was skeptical that even Dimitri would be able to move it down the stairs and in front of the door. She had to admit it would make a very effective barricade, although she didn’t have to admit it out loud. Felix was already at one end of the desk, lifting at it experimentally. Still a bit sullen, she took her place on the other end of the desk. As sullenness was Felix’s default state, he didn’t seem to notice.

“On three,” he said, grasping either end of the desk. It was practically Annette’s entire armspan to follow suit, so she settled for grasping the edges at a more central spot. “One – two – _three_!”

Annette made an embarrassing, high-pitched squeaking sound as she lifted, and even Felix grunted with effort, his muscles tensing under his dress shirt as he threw his entire weight into the project.

The desk didn’t budge.

Felix frowned at the desk, and quickly turned his frown to Annette. “Position your hands wider, you’re not going to get any leverage like that,” he said. He started to lean forward, but quickly drew back at the ferocious glare Annette gave him in response – not that he could reach her from across the desk. She moved her arms a few inches outward and then gave him another scowl, daring him to correct her. He did not take the dare. “On three,” he said again. “One – two – _three._ ”

The desk moved a couple of inches, not really towards the door but definitely in a direction of some sort, before they both lost their grip and it crashed to the ground again. Annette gave a gasp as pain shot up her arm. She let go of the desk and took a step back, gently massaging her sore wrist. It felt like her entire arm was throbbing as she brushed her fingers against it, though the pain was most concentrated in her inner wrist. Annette frowned at it, blinking back tears. She didn’t need Felix seeing her tear up at an arm injury; he probably injured his arm while training all the time. He probably did it on purpose, just for fun, or to give himself a challenge, or to see if he could still feel things. Annette’s next breath sounded like a sob and she felt very foolish and useless, indeed.

Felix appeared not to notice. He stared at the desk in disgust, as if it had personally offended him with its size and weight. “I guess we could barricade the door with something else,” he said, badly concealing his disappointment. “It was always kind of a temporary plan, anyways. How are you at lifting couches?”

“Definitely a top ten hobby of mine,” Annette said, not looking up at him, as she was still on the fence about whether she’d forgiven him or not.

Felix mistook her reticence. “Hey, what’s wrong with your wrist?” he asked, leaning over the desk but still too far away to see her properly. “Did you punch a guy wrong or something?”

Annette tugged the sleeve of her academy uniform down, golden cuffs reaching to the heels of her hands. “I’m not _stupid_ , Felix, I know how to throw a punch,” she snapped. “I almost gave Sylvain a black eye when you taught me, remember?”

“If you’d just been a couple of inches taller,” Felix said, and Annette thought she saw the ghost of a smile at the memory, but it disappeared into a much deeper frown as he leaned forward again. “So what is it?”

“I . . . ran into some, um,” Annette stuttered, her voice catching as she remembered the glint in the woman’s eyes when she looked at her. _Little insect_. “I ran into some trouble in the library. A dark mage. I think she was friends with those masked guys, maybe. She, well – my wrist is where my crest is,” she finally blurted out, as if that explained everything.

Felix narrowed his eyes. He reached out to her from across the length of the desk, but Annette pulled away, cradling her wrist against herself protectively. Felix pressed his palms into the desk and vaulted on top of it, sliding over in one quick motion until he was sitting on the opposite end, close enough to reach his hand out to Annette again.

“Let me see,” he said, and it wasn’t the authority in his voice but the sudden, unexpected gentleness that caused Annette to uncurl from herself and reach her hand out.

He pushed back her sleeve and tugged her closer, until she was standing flush at the edge of the desk, his knees boxing her in. Annette winced as he brushed his fingers over her wrist, pushing her sleeve up to her elbow. But her small gasp was nothing to Felix’s sharp, horrified intake of breath as he looked down at her inner arm. The crest of Dominic, imprinted in miniature on Annette’s wrist, flared up in a bloody, violent red, overtaking her veins and freckles, which generally were so prominent across her arm. He ran his fingers across it, then quickly pulled away as it pulsated with white light, sending a shockwave down Annette’s spine.

“Seiros,” he swore, reaching out to catch Annette as she shuddered and swayed into him. “I didn’t mean – you shouldn’t – what did I _do_?”

“No, it’s not you,” Annette said. She grasped at the desk for balance, but it was suddenly too low and she was too shaky, so she grasped onto Felix for balance instead. He flinched in surprise, as if he hadn’t been the one that moved over to _her_ , but she ignored this and held out her wrist again. “It was some spell. I don’t know exactly, but it activated my crest – it’s usually chance, you know? I don’t usually control it. But this was intentional, and it was too much – and it hasn’t gone back to normal since.”

“That doesn’t – that can’t – that shouldn’t _happen_ ,” Felix said, and he was flustered enough that Annette looked at him sharply. Seeing him afraid made her more afraid, and his face was very white as he looked down at her wrist. Annette leaned her head against his shoulder, unsure if she was trying to reassure him or reassure herself, and his heart was beating even faster than her own. Felix reached down and wrapped his hand around hers, lightly, as if that was where the injury was. Raising her arm up to her eye level, Felix dropped his hand from around her waist and traced her crest with his thumb, his touch so light that she could barely feel it. Annette shivered again, and turned her face into him, not wanting to look at the mark on her arm, which had always seemed like such a soft and steady part of her. She could feel Felix’s breath against her ear, warm and safe, even as his voice was concerned.

“I don’t understand,” he said softly. “Who would _do_ this to you?”

The thundering footsteps in the hallway outside interrupted any reply Annette might have been planning to make.

This time, it was Annette who swore, a series of oaths incorporating every saint and god she could remember off the top of her head. She blushed when she heard her own voice saying such things, but Felix was already off the desk and down the stairs, grabbing random furniture and stacking it against the door. The footsteps came closer, and Annette could hear wordless, angry voices outside the door. The door handle shook, but remained locked. Felix froze, holding a side table midair, clearly trying to decide if they could keep quiet and hope the voices went away.

Annette looked around frantically for a way to improve the situation. Seteth’s desk was too big to move but not big enough to hide underneath, and she doubted his piles of paperwork would be of use to her now. His bookshelves might have contained some useful knowledge for fighting masked mages with a Crest agenda, but she didn’t have the time to read through them and find out. She swiveled, the sunlight catching in her eyes as it shone through the stain-glass window in his office. The window appeared to depict one of the saints, St. Cichol probably, fighting a dragon – or maybe negotiating with the dragon? The dragon curved around the saint in a symmetrical semi-circle, regardless. Cichol smirked down on Annette, wise and serene and obnoxious, and she cursed him for giving her no clues on how to escape.

  
And then, Annette took back all her curses and converted them to praise, and then converted those to confessions, for she had just figured out _exactly_ how she planned to escape.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Will the lock hold long enough for Annette to attempt a daring escape? What dark and mysterious secrets do the masked intruders hide, and what do they want with our intrepid heroes? And will Felix ever get any of those swords back? Tune in next time for A Paneful Escape, or Listening at Cichols.
> 
> Aka: Two more chapters to come, featuring Garreg Mach parkour, conveniently timed Crest Activation, an ad hoc distress flare, and some extremely nifty art to go along with it all.
> 
> If you'd like preview of the art, you can find it [here](https://twitter.com/soultyghost/status/1301564304244654080)! You can also follow [soulty](https://twitter.com/soultyghost) and [Rose](https://twitter.com/Rose3Writes) on twitter if you'd like.


	2. Upward

The desk wouldn’t do, it was too heavy. 

Instead, Annette picked up Seteth’s chair, large and unwieldy even for someone of his stature, and flung it directly at stained-glass Cichol’s judicious face, letting out something of a battle cry as the chair flew across the room.

The chair bounced harmlessly off the glass and clattered to the floor. Stained-glass, Annette realized, was actually pretty thick.

“What was the play here, Dominic?” Felix asked, and Annette gave a startled squeak to realize he was standing directly behind her. “Are you just wanting to make as much noise as possible, or are you hoping to scare them away, or . . . ?”

Annette didn’t stomp her foot, but she felt like it. It was hard to believe that less than five minutes ago she had found Felix’s presence rather comforting, but stress will do strange things to people. She glared up at Felix in defiance, and it was easy to feign superiority when the overturned chair was out of her field of vision.

“I'm finding us a way out, Felix,” she said, her voice haughty to hide her embarrassment. “You said the roof was Plan C, and Plan A is failing pretty badly, so unless you’ve developed a Plan B in the last five minutes –”

“Stop it with the logic puzzles; there’s a reason I never pay attention during Hanneman’s lectures,” Felix snapped. His eyes slid over to the stained glass window, entering a futile staring contest with the saint and the dragon.

“You’d be perfectly good at Reason if you _did_ pay attention, you know,” Annette scolded. “Not everything can be solved with a sword, and the professor thinks you have real poten – what are you _doing_?”

Felix looked over at her, his hands halfway through unbuttoning his vest and working through the last two buttons even as he gave her an exasperated glance. “Trying Plan C, I guess,” he said with a sigh. He stripped off his vest and began wrapping it around his hand. Annette blinked at him in surprise.

“You mean – you think it’s a good idea?” she asked, excited. No one ever thought her ideas were good.

The doors behind them shuddered loudly, causing both Felix and Annette to flinch. Annette turned towards the door anxiously. The handle rattled wildly, but the furniture Felix had managed to pile in front of the door actually seemed to have some staying power, which Annette found frankly shocking. But not much staying power, she realized, watching an end table waver uncertainly against the force of the door.

Felix let out of breath, somewhere between a sigh and a hiss. “I think it’s an idea,” he confirmed. “Stay back.” And before Annette could reply, he ran forward towards the window, avoided the chair, and punched.

Glass shattered outward, a high-pitched, horrible sound, like the dozens of drinking glasses Annette had accidentally dropped across her lifetime, but strung together and amplified a tenfold. Felix punched again, and again, and Annette hid her face, suddenly feeling as if it were a real man crumbling to the ground in front of her, and not just a priceless representation of one. Finally, Felix stumbled back, shaking his hand out, wincing. The dragon now encircled an empty silhouette of a man, jagged glass still jutting along the edge. Annette glanced at Felix’s hand as he shrugged his vest back on, but he glanced over at her and she tore her eyes away before he could catch her staring. She had no doubt he’d bruised some knuckles, if not outright broken his hand, but he seemed in no mood for Faith magic at the moment – and truly, the goddess might strike them both down out of sheer annoyance if Annette called on her for help right now.

“Can we fit?” Annette asked tentatively. There was a gaping hole most notably where St. Cichol’s chest was supposed to be, even if glass was torn around the edges still.

Felix inched forward. “If I can, you can,” he reasoned. He poked his head out the window, then looked back at her. “It looks like we’ll have to scale a bit of the wall before we can get to the – well, just follow after me, okay?” And before she could answer, he’d shimmed out the window, his shoulder momentarily catching on the glass before he powered through, and was out of her sight.

Annette hurried after him – the door rattling behind her suddenly seemed much more terrifying than the illustrated dragon or the very real fall that lay ahead of her. She looked out the window and turned to see Felix on a ledge to her right, hugging the wall as wind whipped through his hair.

“Can you make it?” he shouted over the wind, holding out a hand to her.

“Ummm,” Annette said, looking at the wide gap between the window and the ledge, already poking herself on glass shards as she leaned too far in the wrong direction.

A crash behind her caused her to jerk back. She whipped her head around to see the door bash open, the three masked figures standing in the doorway at the end of the room.

“Right, yes – catch!” Annette said, quickly scrambling out the window and more or less throwing herself at Felix. He didn’t quite catch her so much as slam her against the wall with one hand and awkwardly grasp at her waist with the other, but she wasn’t tumbling towards certain doom, so Annette chalked it up as a win for both of them.

She gave him a bright smile. “I’d start walking _that_ way as fast as possible,” she said, nudging him away from the window. “The crash you just heard, for once, wasn’t me.”

Felix’s eyes widened in understanding, and flattening himself against the wall behind them, he began slowly inching across the narrow ledge, grasping Annette’s wrist once again, as if that would stop her from ever falling.

The ledge was barely wide enough to hold them, stretching out along the side of the outer wall. It continued for several yards before dead-ending into a wall running perpendicular to their path. Felix nodded towards the dead end, where Annette spotted another ledge about a foot above Felix’s head. She realized this one would lead to the roof proper; the very top of the monastery lay directly above them.

“If we can get down there, I can give you a leg up, and maybe we can find a different way down,” he said, as they inched slowly across their narrow ledge. “Keep your center of gravity low, and don’t look down.”

Annette rolled her eyes at his overworried advice. She was clumsy, yes, but she wasn’t stupid. And she had a lot riding on making some common sense decisions right now.

They inched another three steps close to the end of their ledge, and Annette looked down.

It wasn’t the height that caused her to gasp, although from the way Felix’s grip tightened around her fingers, she doubted he would believe her. Garreg Mach – her school, her home, the backdrop of the happiest year of her life – stretched out before them, and it was fire and smoke and little else. Beyond the walls of the monastery she could see the fight still raging on, but the town surrounding the grounds was almost unrecognizable, grey ash and orange ember in place of shops and houses and gardens. The reds and oranges of the sunset seemed to extend the fire beyond the horizon, and Annette would have cried to see her beloved home in ruins, had she the time to do anything but take one step, then another, then another, then another.

“I said not to look down,” Felix said sharply, drawing her back to a reality somewhere between her own tiny steps sideways and the wanton destruction of her entire world.

“Felix,” she said, looking up at him and forgetting to argue back. “Who do you think got out alive?”

Felix stopped in his tracks at that, and Annette inched her way directly into him. He turned and looked at her, his face set with grim determination.

“Listen, Annette,” he said, bringing a hand to her shoulder. She turned in towards him, as much as she could on the narrow ledge, leaning in to the steadiness of his hand, a comforting contrast to her own shaking knees. “This isn’t an end of the month mission where we have a banquet to celebrate afterwards. You know that. This is war. And the only way we’re going to get through this is if we don’t stop to ask – get back!”

Annette never found out what Felix didn’t want to stop and ask. He flung the hand on her shoulder out and pressed her against the wall, flattening himself beside her as a dark spiral of magic grazed them. Annette, still pressed flat against the wall behind her, whipped her head to the side. A dark, masked mage was leaning halfway out the window, oblivious to the jagged glass that had to be catching on his billowing robes. The rancid, decaying smell of successfully-cast dark magic filled Annette nostrils, and she could feel her heart rate speed up as the mage locked eyes with her – or, at least, she assumed he did. The mask made it tricky to tell.

“Seiros, Sothis, and Cethleann,” Annette swore, and Felix was already dragging her after him, his inching footsteps becoming faster, or wider, or more reckless as he pulled her away from the window. The mage cocked his head to the side and drew his arm back again, preparing another spell.

With one hand still clutching Felix, Annette flung her arm out to the side and threw a gust of wind directly at the mage face. If she was a sitting duck for attacks, so was he.

The wind whipped out in front of her, three entwined streams of light that weaved themselves into a braided vortex. Hanneman had once told her she had the cleanest form for a Cutting Gale that he had seen in the past ten years. The mage evidently agreed on some level – he pulled himself back inside as the wind smashed into the remnants of the window, more glass shattering in every direction as bits of dragon tail and glass sky fell to the ground below. But at least he was out of their hair for the thirty seconds it would take him to navigate all that broken glass and line up his shot again.

Annette could see her crest flaring through her sleeve, now, bright light pulsing as she cast the spell and hanging on too long as a shudder of pain and power coursed up her arm and settled in her chest. The world went black for a second, and she hugged the wall, gasping. When her vision cleared she realized Felix had slid his arm around her waist and was practically holding her upright.

“What are you _doing_?” he hissed at her, but his eyes slid quickly to the empty window, and Annette might have been delirious but she could have sworn he looked impressed for a brief moment. “Did you hit him?” he asked, and he sounded impressed, as well. “Did he fall?”

“Keep walking,” Annette gasped out, although he already was, albeit slowly. “I just bought us some time. He’ll think twice before he leans out again.”

“I . . . maybe,” said Felix hesitantly. Annette squeaked as he slid his other hand around her waist, holding her on either side. “Can you get around me? I can give you a leg up onto the roof,” he said.

Annette looked past him. They were still a good two feet away from being anywhere near a climbable position. “Keep walking,” she said again, pushing his hand away. “We’ll figure it out when we get there.”

Felix frowned, and for a moment Annette thought he was going to stop, but he took another small step before she could leverage the full force of her disapproving stare. “I know, but –” he paused, looked down at her, let out an exasperated sigh. “Can you just get around me? They might hit you next time.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Annette snapped, pushing into him, forcing him to keep moving, step by step, away from the window. “Between the two of us, who’s going to be better at taking a direct hit from an unfamiliar magic user?”

Felix glared at her the same way he glared at her in class when she was clearly winning a debate he hadn’t even wanted to get sucked into. “I don’t know, Annie,” he said tightly. “At the moment I’m going to go with _not you_.”

“Of all the times for you to decide you believe in chivalry,” Annette began, but she cut off at the way Felix’s eyes sharpened, his gaze shooting above her head. She flipped around to see the return of the mage, leaning further out the window now. Annette felt Felix’s arms move to wrap around her and she flailed, throwing him off of her just as the mage cast another sphere of dark, pulsating light in their direction.

His aim was true this time, and the magic sunk into Annette with devastating force, stronger and surer than even Lysithea’s practiced attacks. Annette felt like her veins were on fire and she heard a sizzling, unpleasant sound far too close to her ear that she realized must have been the result of a hit to her shoulder. She managed no words as she tossed out a counterattack. It was more reflex than anything else, but the wind still braided itself together and she had the distinct pleasure of seeing it hit its mark, and there was another shattering of glass as the mage crumpled out of sight. The world swam in front of her, spots in front of her eyes and a shaky spike of adrenaline running from her wrist to her elbow, and she felt her knees buckle.

She couldn’t make out what Felix was saying, but from the tone alone she was glad Mercedes wasn’t around to hear him – although she desperately wanted Mercedes for basically every other reason at the moment. She felt him pulling her backwards, her feet limply dragging across the stone of the ledge, and she tried to find the strength to move her muscles, to set her feet on solid ground again, even if it did vaguely seem like they were suddenly going faster.

She felt Felix’s breath against her ear as he leaned in against her, pulling her a little more upright.

“If you can hear me right now,” he said, his voice low and urgent, “Tuck your elbows in, and try to roll when you land.”

He grasped her by the waist and flung her above him. Annette saw the world spin for a second, saw Felix’s boots and then his sword and then his own flashing, activating Crest through the thin material of his shirt on his upper arm. Felix lifted Annette in an arc reaching the foot or so above them, tossing her so she landed on the roof with a _thud._

She did not tuck her elbows in. She did not roll. Everything hurt so much she wasn’t even sure anything hurt at all.

The world was finally coming into focus when she saw Felix’s fingers appear on the ledge as he pulled himself up after her.

“Fe . . . lix?” Annette asked as his wrists appeared, then his elbows, then his head and shoulders. Felix also didn’t look so great, she realized. She tried to remember when he had gotten a cut above his eyebrow, and if it was her fault that his hair had ended up so disheveled, when he was usually as sharp and clean as the swords he attended to so obsessively.

He looked at her and frowned. “Can you, like – can you roll out of the way?” he asked, sounding more annoyed than Annette thought was strictly necessarily. “You’re kind of directly in the way right – _goddess_.”

Annette didn’t have to see the spell make impact to know what had happened. The hiss of magic, the smell of sulfur, the pain that flashed across Felix’s face for a moment and no more – she didn’t get full marks on every Reason exam without a bit of deductive observation. She was on her feet and scrambling towards him faster than she could think, except when she was able to think, she realized her “feet” were her “knees” and she wasn’t scrambling so much as crawling. Still, she managed to throw her arms around Felix with a reckless abandon. Her own sapped strength wasn’t much use for pulling him over the ledge and onto the roof with her, but Felix wrapped his arms around her shoulders, and she was evidently a better handhold than the tile beneath them. Between the two of them, Felix managed to pull himself up onto the roof beside her, and they both collapsed in a heap, perhaps too close to the edge for comfort but too tired to move away.

“They hit your leg?” Annette finally asked, staring up at the sky, not at Felix. The sun had long ceased to be directly above them, and brilliant pink and orange hues spread out before her. It was almost pretty.

“Barely,” said Felix. “It’s nothing; don’t worry about it.” 

Absolutely nothing in his voice was believable, so Annette pulled herself up to her elbows and looked down at him. The leg of his trousers was still smoking slightly, and Felix was grimacing – although that didn’t really help with a medical diagnosis; Felix was usually grimacing. Annette sat up and leaned towards his leg, the world slightly spinning with too much movement. As she reached for him, Felix’s hand shot out, grabbing her wrist.

“Don’t,” he said between gritted teeth, and from the way he curled in on himself, the whine in his voice, Annette almost believed the stories Sylvain would smugly share about how Felix used to be the crybaby of the group as a little kid. There was something slightly wounded in his expression right now, which Annette chose to ignore.

“We can’t just stay here, Felix; they’re going to come after us,” she said, pulling her hand out of his. He let go easily. “You’re not going to be much good if you can’t use your leg.”

“Don’t – stop using magic,” he snapped, his eyes flashing angrily for a moment. “It’s _hurting_ you, Annette.” 

“I know that, I’m the one getting hurt,” she shot back. “I know my limits, Felix. I’d rather use a little healing magic right now then try to carry you across the grounds until we find help.”

“ . . . idiot,” Felix mumbled, but he pulled his hand away. Annette gingerly prodded at the side of his leg, and winced as her hand came away bloody. The injury was right at his knee, caught somewhere at the top of his boot. She wasn’t sure how the fabric of his clothing hadn’t torn more, but dark magic, from what she understood, was designed to settle under the surface of your flesh and do damage from the inside out. They didn’t have time to properly assess and clean the wound, Annette realized that - she could see areas of the injury through small rips in the fabric, but she would mostly be working blind, and working fast. She called magic to her fingers; a pale white glow of the most basic healing spell she knew. Healing magic always took as much as it gave, if you weren’t experienced with it, and she wasn’t a talented healer. Still, if she could patch him up enough to walk, someone better could finish the job when they got out of the monastery.

If they got out of the monastery.

Through the gaps in the fabric, Annette could see the edges of the wound begin to draw themselves together, flesh mending flesh. Felix’s breathing grew steadier. Annette could feel the limit of the incantation as magic began to fade from her fingers, though she suspected she hadn’t entirely healed the injury. She screwed her eyes shut, willing the last bit of magic to last a little bit longer, but was jarred back into the present reality by Felix’s hand on her wrist again.

“That’s good enough,” he said, his voice and eyes sharp in equal measure. “I can walk now; are you happy?”

“I wasn’t done, you know –” Annette started, but the world spinned around her again, more violently than it had before, and when her vision cleared Felix was holding her up by both her shoulders. She glanced down and her crest was pulsating again, a soft white light in contrast to the violent activation that went along with her wind spells. She frowned at her wrist, then at Felix. “You could say ‘thank you,’” she said.

“Can you walk?” he asked instead, drawing back from her, and she was relieved that she didn’t sway when his hands wandered back to his sword and away from her.

“I should be fine,” she said, even though every nerve ending she had was arguing for the opposite. “Can _you_ walk?” she asked, casting a suspicious glance at him.

Felix opened his mouth, but tensed and swiveled around before he could make some snarky reply. Annette would never get around to asking him what he heard that had him on his feet so quickly, but as the masked figure appeared on the ledge behind them, Felix struck before the mage had a chance to cast a spell. Felix lunged forward, his blade out of its sheath and cutting across the mage’s chest practically before Annette had a chance to register that someone was there. The mage flailed for a moment, and Felix struck again, his blade swinging violently in the opposite direction. The mage swayed backwards and then tumbled out of sight, and Annette supposed it was probably a blessing that he was most likely dead before he fell from that height.

Felix sheathed his sword, straightening up from the half-crouched position he’d landed in after his attack. “Can walk pretty well, yeah,” he replied. “Solid healing, Dominic.” He held out his hand. “Let’s go; that guy definitely had friends.”

The roof of this section of Garreg Mach was blessedly flat, although turrets and towers dotted the tiled landscape. Felix aimed for an impressively ornate tower to their right that Annette realized housed the bells that rang twice a day for morning and evening prayers. Annette wasn’t even sure if her feet were connected to the rest of her body at this point, but Felix pulled her along quickly, darting behind the bell tower and out of the sightline of any mages that were following their path. Annette sank behind it, her back against the wall of the tower, and Felix crouched at the edge, looking around the corner suspiciously.

“There were three total, right?” he said, and continued on before Annette could answer. “We’ve taken care of one, but he had a friend helping him up. But if that _friend_ has a friend – I guess it depends on if they split up or if they try to attack us both at once. If we can isolate them, I can dodge easier up here – it shouldn’t be too hard to –”

“Felix,” Annette broke in. “You’re bleeding.”

She brushed her fingers against the back of his hand as Felix looked down in surprise. Whether he had cut his hand on the glass or the window or the rough tile of the roof or any number of other dangerous surroundings, three of his fingers were indeed badly scraped, and blood was gathering on the back of his hand.

“It’s nothing,” he said brusquely. “Didn’t even notice it.”

  
“It’s . . . so much blood,” Annette said. She’d seen worse, obviously, but there was something very jarring about the way Felix was trying to ignore that he was hurt, when Annette discovered a new bruise or scrape every time she looked at him.

Felix yanked his hand away, and only then did Annette realize her fingers had begun to glow with the faint white light of healing magic, without her even thinking about it.

“Don’t – listen, I’ll take care of it,” Felix said, his eyes flashing with annoyance even as he turned away from her. As Annette stared on in mild confusion, Felix ran his fingers along the top of his shirtsleeve. “Here,” he muttered, finding a tear along the top seam at the shoulder. He yanked quickly at the sleeve, tearing it off, and shimmied his arm out of it. He had already begun to rip the sleeve into rough strips by the time Annette found her voice.

“Homemade bandages?” she guessed. “I’m sorry I don't have a vulnerary or anything.”

“Yeah, well, neither of us were really expecting for . . . any of this, to happen,” Felix said gruffly. He handed her two of the strips of cloth, lightweight but certainly not sanitized the way they were in a medic tent. Annette took them, and he reached out his hand. “If you wouldn’t mind,” he muttered. 

Annette almost smiled as she took his hand in hers, deftly wrapping it with the makeshift bandages. This was the first time, she realized, that she could clearly see Felix’s crest, a large mark across his upper arm that she had sometimes seen flash beneath his shirts during battle. 

“Too tight?” she asked, drawing her eyes back down and refocusing on his hand. 

“Doesn’t really matter,” Felix mumbled. “Just do it quickly; we need to find an escape route.”

“How are we getting out of here, even if we do – even if they aren’t chasing after us anymore?” Annette asked hesitantly. “I don’t think there’s actually another way down.”

Felix frowned. “Let’s delegate tasks,” he said finally. “I’ll figure out how to stop the mages; you figure out a way off the roof.”

“You could just say you don’t kn –” Annette started, but a crash of footsteps from the edge of the roof made them both freeze. Annette dropped Felix’s bandage and gave him a tentative thumbs up - he’d be able to hold a sword without bleeding all over it, at least. In a flash, Felix was on his feet, peering around the clock tower to try to see who or what had made that noise. Annette leaned back against the wall of the bell tower and held her breath, closing her eyes as if that would help things for one long, tense moment.

Felix pulled himself back behind the clock tower and crouched beside Annette. “Okay,” he said, his voice low. “One mage, not two, thank the goddess. We’ll deal with the last one later. Or maybe you knocked him out with that wind blast; I can’t tell them apart with the masks.”

“I don’t think I did,” Annette said begrudgingly. She knew her own strength.

“Doesn’t matter right now,” Felix said, unconcerned. “The point is: stay here, stay down, don’t cast magic. Got it?”

“Who put you in charge –” Annette started, but Felix had already disappeared around the corner of their makeshift hiding spot, his movements suddenly silent and catlike, despite his evident limp.

Annette wanted to shout after him, to get the last word in somehow, but she didn’t have much to say and it would have been incredibly stupid to raise her voice, anyway. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped an arm around them, leaning back against the wall behind her. The last time she had tried a game of hide and seek this afternoon, things hadn’t gone well for her, but she hadn’t had time to tell Felix that. She wished she’d asked for a dagger or something – Felix seemed to have an endless supply. She would have liked a dagger in the library. She would have liked any weapon at all in the library, besides her own quavering voice and legs that didn’t run when she told them to.

Annette studied the inside of her wrist. The crest seemed to be fading, slightly, although it might have just been the contrast to outdoor lighting compared to the dim lighting of the library and study. She ran her finger across her crest, lightly. She expected it to be red hot; her wrist was burning up from the inside, but it actually felt slightly cool to the touch. She frowned. She’d never heard of magic specifically designed to interact with crests. She’d have to ask Professor Hanneman when she saw him again.

If she saw him again. If he made it out of the monastery alive.

If she made it out of the monastery alive.

She heard the footprints in advance, this time, and she was very eager to not have a repeat of the library. Annette pulled herself to her feet and was met with a spinning sensation so intense she momentarily lost balance and vision. She leaned against the tower and took a stabilizing breath. When the world came back into focus, she felt almost normal – until she looked up and saw the masked mage standing in front of her, mere feet away.

For some reason, her first emotion was annoyance that he was tall enough to look down on her. She’d gotten to her feet; it seemed unfair that she still was at a disadvantage. Her second emotion was pretty solidly fear, however, so she knew that at least somewhere in the back of her brain, her survival instinct was still kicking in.

“Out of places to run, I’m afraid,” he said. She’d expected his voice to be muffled from the mask, but the syllables rang crystal clear through the evening air. Annette took a step backwards automatically, and he matched her step for step. “I ought to kill you where you stand, for all the trouble you’ve caused,” he continued. “But I’m feeling nice today, and I know a crest when I see one.” He tilted his head to the side, and Annette pulled her arm in instinctively, shielding her wrist from his view.

“You’ll know a crest’s power when you see one, too,” she said, sounding braver than she felt. “Stay away from me.”

“And otherwise, what? You’ll kill me?” he took a step closer. “With what? I don’t see any weapons. If magic is the best you’ve got, I’d love to see you try.” He stopped his advance, glancing at her up and down once more. “Where’s your boyfriend? There were two of you last I checked. Did he abandon you to save his own skin?”

“He’s not my – he would never _abandon_ –” Annette spluttered, temporarily distracted, but a flicker of movement made her lose her train of thought, and when she looked back at the mage she suddenly felt a lot more confident.

“Look behind you,” she explained, and Felix’s sword slashed through the mage before he had time to ask what she meant.

Felix frowned at her, sheathing his sword as the mage collapsed between them. Blood had splattered across his school uniform, and he wiped at his face with the back of his wrist, blinking as he did so.

“Took you long enough,” Annette said, crossing her arms and looking away. The back of her neck still prickled from the spells the mage didn’t cast, but could have.

“I would’ve been faster if I thought he was going to hurt you,” Felix said, unbothered by her barbs. “I was hoping he might reveal something about who he was, or what he wanted. He seemed to like talking.”

“Changed your mind before he could say anything important, though, didn’t you,” Annette said, not placated by Felix’s reasoning.

Felix’s resting frown deepened. “He was getting annoying,” was all he added.

Annette glanced down at the pile of robes between them, and shivered. She had many, _many_ unanswered questions plaguing her mind at the moment. She went with the most obvious one.

“What now?” she asked, hugging her arms closer to herself. 

“I don’t suppose you’ve found a way off the roof since I saw you last,” Felix said. He reached out his hand and guided Annette around the dead mage, pulling her to another side of the clock tower, so they now faced the opposite edge of the monastery roof.

“No, I was a little distracted by all the threats of murder,” Annette said, shaking his hand away and giving him a glare before she looked out over the roof they were standing on. They weren’t supposed to be there. Not just in the obvious, Seteth-would-give-them-detention-if-the-school-still-existed sense, but because the roof of the monastery was simply not designed for people. The tile was uneven and rough; the flooring beneath their feet was covered in dirt and gravel; the towers and turrets jutted out at uneven, frenzied intervals. It was impossible to navigate by looking around, let alone by trying to walk across it. And there was still a third mage out there, somewhere. The roof was open air; Annette could see straight across from one end to the other. If they didn’t stay on their guard, it would be impossibly easy to line up a blast of magic and take them out before they even knew they were in the mage’s sights.

All in all, it wasn’t an ideal location.

Felix sighed, clearly taking the same stock as Annette. “Well, I guess our first step is trying to find a ledge down,” he said. “Hopefully something with a gentle slope; I don't particularly want to carry you down.”

Annette snorted, but avoided pointing out that she very much doubted Felix _could_ carry her down a sheer drop of a building with the number of injuries he’d sustained in the last hour. Instead, she tentatively stepped out into the open air beyond the shelter of their tower and, when no magic hurtled into her at an alarming rate she more confidently made her way to the opposite edge of the roof.

It wasn’t an encouraging sight. They were probably three to four stories up at this point, what with the high ceilings of Rhea’s audience chambers, and the edge fell to a straight two story drop before connecting to another hallway of the monastery, which would lead to other rooms and chambers of the sprawling campus building. In the distance and below them, Annette could see the windows for the great dining hall, the classrooms, even the second story dorms, all spread out in front of her and frustratingly out of reach. But directly in front of her, there were no windows and no ledges – just a straight drop down.

“It’s not . . . ideal,” she said as Felix stepped up next to her. She saw his hand reach for her elbow out of the corner of her eye as she leaned over the edge, but he quickly dropped it.

“Okay, so climbing down is out,” he said. “Going back the way we came seems out as well? We could always . . . hm.” He looked around the roof desperately, and Annette joined him, trying to come up with something, anything, that would seem like a step forward rather than a step backward.

It was a wyvern cry that made Annette look up, but once she looked up, it was impossible to look away.

A chaotic battle was raging in the sky above them, wyvern knights and pegasus riders swooping around each other in the distance, over the battlefield. An injured wyvern, doubtless the source of the cry, plummeted toward the ground, its rider desperately trying to slow its descent into something survivable. But Annette’s eyes slid from the battlefield to the monastery grounds themselves, as a battalion’s worth of pegasus knights were taking to the skies and flying away; calvary and fliers alike bustling students and civilians away from the monastery, which would surely be overtaken by Empire troops by nightfall.

“Felix,” Annette said, grabbing his arm. He followed her hand as she pointed skyward, at the pegasus knights making circles that looked lazy from far away but Annette knew from experience were calculated and crucial to staying in formation.

“Yep,” he said, crossing her and walking to the farmost edge of the roof, as close to the riders as he could possibly get. His hand reached behind him automatically but grasped empty air, and he clenched it into a fist. “Damn, I didn’t bring my bow; this wasn’t supposed to turn into a fight,” he grumbled.

“Felix!” Annette said again, panic rising in her voice. “We are clearly _not_ on the same page here; those are Seiros troops!”

“What? No!” Felix gave her a look that was too shocked to be judgemental, and she felt all the more judged for it. “Makeshift flare, Annette. Unless you think you can sing loud enough for them to hear you from down –”

“Don’t even _start_ ,” Annette said, feeling her cheeks flush red. For a moment, she could have sworn Felix actually had the gall to smile. She prodded him in the chest, which she knew from experience would annoy him enough to wipe the smirk off his face. “And you don’t need to go around lighting _arrows on fire_ like some sort of side character in an overwrought Loog epic. I can cast a light flare in my sleep. You’re traveling with the Blue Lion’s greatest mage, remember?”

“Absolutely not,” Felix said quickly, leaning away from her finger as she poked at him, like she knew he would. “What part of ‘don’t cast spells, Annette’ is confusing to you? What part do I need to break down?”

“The part where you think you get to tell me what to do,” Annette replied, spinning back to look towards the knights, already measuring the angle she would need to cast within their line of sight. “Unless you want to try _your_ singing voice first?” she asked with a glance over her shoulder and a smirk of her own. “I’ve never heard it; for all I know you’re really good. Or at least really loud.”

The disgruntled glare that Felix gave her almost made the day worth it. Rather than argue, however, he took a step closer to her, grabbing her by the shoulder with one hand and her good wrist with the other. Bending down so that he was looking over her shoulder, he lined up her hand, pointing towards a pack of pegasus riders towards the back.

“That’s Ingrid back there, third from the back. You see her?” he muttered in her ear. Annette could feel his bangs brushing against her as he leaned in. “Aim your signal for just in her line of vision; she’ll figure out it’s us, nothing gets past Ingrid.”

“How can you tell it’s her?” Annette said, squinting. In their armor and from that distance, all pegasus riders looked alike to her.

“Flies crooked, always has,” Felix said, stepping back. Annette had no idea what that meant and he didn’t elaborate. He did, after a moment’s reflection, grab her by the shoulders and step her back another foot from the ledge. “Got a clear shot?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Annette said, suddenly feeling a surge of nerves about the repercussions of this decision, even though it was a simple enough spell, one she could have done before even arriving at the academy.

“Right,” Felix said. “One shot, make it count, and if you for a _second_ feel like it’s going to overwhelm you, we’ll find something to light on fire instead. And if anything happens, fall backwards instead of forwards,” he added as an afterthought. He looked at the sheer drop that was still less than a few feet away from Annette and moved his hands towards her shoulders again, possibly to pull her back even further. Annette swatted him away, annoyed.

“I’m not going to fall off the roof from casting a basic light spell, Felix,” she snapped. “Even if I did, wouldn’t you catch me, villain?”

“I can’t do everything around here,” Felix said, and before Annette had time to properly roll her eyes, he turned around, his back to her, his sword swung up and ready to strike. “Someone’s got to watch our position,” he said over his shoulder. “You cast that flare; I’ll watch your back.”

Annette quickly turned back to the edge of the roof, eyes on the pegasus riders in the distance. There was no sense in arguing, and they were already gaining distance as they flew away. She judged the trajectory of her magic once more, aiming for above Ingrid, in front of her, where she would be sure to see it. Annette leaned back for a breath, her shoulder blades momentarily bumping below Felix’s, and the she flung both her arms forward, rounding through the shoulders and pushing from her elbows, not her wrists, the same form she’d practiced since she’d first learned a basic fire spell in her preteens. She felt the sudden rush she always did when she hit her marks on an incantation, silent or otherwise – a traveling of energy that started somewhere deep inside her chest, rushing upward to her shoulders and coursing down her arms before a sphere of light appeared when her two hands met. She winced in pain as the energy traveled across her crest, once more flaring too bright and fading too slowly, but if she cried out as well as grimaced, Felix kept good on his word to leave her alone. The sphere of light carried the forward momentum that she felt before she truly saw it, rocketing across the sky, lessening in power but not in brightness as it traveled away from her. But Annette didn’t need the light to damage. It just had to be bright. And when it streaked past the pegasus third from the back, it was plenty bright, causing the pegasus to rear back momentarily before the light burnt out into obscurity, energy evaporated into the horizon.

The pegasus rider easily pulled her mount back into formation, barely losing posture from the disruption, much less control. She was too far away for Annette to properly read her body language or hear her, but after a brief moment, the pegasus looped to the side, breaking away from the rest of the knights to fly higher, looping in a scouting circle above Annette’s head. Annette narrowed her eyes and cast another sphere of light, this one clumsier and less precise, straight up above her head. She felt Felix tense behind her, the energy from her spell causing their flyaway hair to fan out around their shoulders briefly.

She expected another rebuke as he turned around, but he just muttered, “Did it work?” as he lightly pressed a hand against her shoulder with a nervous energy he probably thought was subtle.

Annette pointed wordlessly upwards as Ingrid completed her loop above them in the distance and redirected towards them. She was so far away her pegasus looked static, even as it flapped its wings, but Annette knew from experience that she was plummeting towards them as fast as any cavalier in their class.

“Yeah, that’s Ingrid,” said Felix, his hand on Annette’s shoulder tightening. Despite the lost sparring matches, the vicious class debates, the countless shrugged off invitations and greetings and olive branches, he couldn’t quite keep the pride out of his voice when he talked about Ingrid. Annette might have missed it when she first came to the academy, but it was unmistakable now. 

She turned up and beamed at him. “Not a bad bow and arrow, huh?”

“The Blue Lion’s greatest mage, huh?” Felix asked. “I’ll have to remember that the next time you won’t go to bed because you’ve got a certification exam in three weeks or whatever.”

Annette pouted as she turned into him, his arm slinging more fully around her shoulder as she looked up at him. He was smirking at her, he always was, but there was something in his eyes that seemed strangely sincere – more sincere than she was used to from Felix Fraldarius, at any rate.

That made it all the worst when the dark magic slammed into his back, propelling him into her with such force that she was barely able to hold him up.

Felix collapsed against her, the breath knocked out of him. Annette clung to his arms, bracing herself to keep from stumbling backwards over the edge of the roof, and looked over his shoulder, where the final masked mage stood in the center of the roof. His long robes and full-faced mask made it impossible to read any expression on him, but magic was gathering lazily at his fingertips as he stared them down. 

“I see Seiros still trains her brats well,” he said, his voice raised as he shouted across the roof. “But not well enough.”

* * *

Illustration by [soultyghost](https://soultyghost.carrd.co/) (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧

> **Notes for the Chapter:**

> Will Annette’s arm ever stop hurting? Will Felix ever be able to swing a sword again? Can Ingrid’s mount even carry that many people? Join us next time in our thrilling conclusion: “The Very Model of a Modern Mage-or General,” or “Pegasus Ex Machina.”
> 
> [soulty](https://twitter.com/soultyghost) and [Rose](https://twitter.com/Rose3Writes) are both on twitter!


	3. Outward

Felix’s legs buckled under him, and Annette could not keep him upright on her own. He sunk to his knees, still bracing against her for what little balance he still had. Dark magic ate at you over time; if he didn’t get medical assistance, and soon – she pushed the thought out of her mind, and Felix’s grasped at her elbow, pulling her attention downward.

“Annette – you’ve got to run,” he said, struggling to pull himself back up to his feet. “I’ll hold him off long enough – if that pegasus knight was really heading this way, they’ll be able to find you, and –”

He cut off as Annette rested a hand on his cheek, and as his own grip on her arm loosened in his surprise she pulled away from him.

“Stay down,” she whispered. “And put pressure on the injury, if you can.” It would be quite the twist to apply consistent pressure to the back of his shoulder, but at this point she was just reciting healing magic basics by rote. Felix stared at her. He looked ready to argue, although perhaps that was just his default expression, but Annette pulled her hand back and stepped away from him before he could reply. She heard her name, strangled and desperate, as she walked towards the mage, but he didn’t – or couldn’t – follow after her.

The mage tilted his head as Annette approached him, the magic in his hand flaring slightly. “No, girl, this isn’t a game of choose-the-sacrifice,” he scoffed at her. “Pick up the boy and bring him along, or I’ll find a faster way to get him off the roof.”

“No.” Annette tried to infuse her voice with as much authority as she could; she didn't have much to offer by way of height or power, compared to her opponent. Still, she drew herself as tall as possible, and met the mage’s eyes without shaking. “This is not a game of anything,” she said, loudly and clearly. “But I’ll let you live if you leave right now.”

To punctuate this point, she drew up her own magic spell, holding wind magic in the palm of her hand. It barely caused her hair to fan out behind her, but even such a meaningless gesture shot pain up her arm. Annette tried to turn her wince into a battle-hardened glare, although she wasn’t sure if she was entirely successful. She thought she heard Felix yell her name again, but adrenaline and fear were ringing in her ears so loudly she could scarcely hear it.

The mage took a step closer. “You’re brave, for an insect,” he said, and Annette narrowed her eyes at his mocking tone. “I should kill you for what you did to my associates, but two crests are hard to kill when you could have them alive instead.”

“I’ll show you hard to kill,” mumbled Annette, and she flung the strongest spell she knew directly at his heart.

The mage’s head tilted slightly towards her hands as she flung them outward, and he launched his own spell at the same time – one that Annette was very worried was not even close to his strongest. Her Cutting Gale scarcely got within half a foot of the mage before it dissipated into nothingness. She dropped to a crouch as the blast of dark magic went sailing over her head, fading away a few feet behind her. Pain wracked her body, and Annette visible shuddered and her Crest flared unevenly on her wrist. She glared at it, shaking her hand a few times experimentally, but her Crest simply flickered back at her.

The mage closed the gap between them with a few long strides. He reached down for her wrist, but Annette snatched her arm away, falling backwards from the force. Unperturbed, he grabbed her by the collar instead, yanking her to her feet, her face inches away from his mask.

“Go ahead and cast another spell if you’d like,” he hissed in her ear. Annette twisted to get away from his voice. She was practically on her tiptoes, he was so much taller than she was. “It looks like you do more damage to yourself than anything I’d throw at you.”

He let go of Annette and she dropped to her feet, gasping for air and clutching her wrist. He still loomed over her, terrifyingly close. “We wanted to extend Crest activation time to make it easier to study, you know,” he said, almost conversationally. Annette’s arm throbbed, and she ran through her list of spells, her training, trying to remember something that would work against an experienced mage. “I’ve never thought of it as offensive rather than scientific, but I suppose if a mage rips themselves apart every time they attack, that’s an ingenious way to –”

Annette punched him in the face. He was about as tall as Sylvain, so she didn’t have to adjust her form very much from her lone session on the training grounds. She realized with some disappointment that the brutal cracking sound as her fist made contact with his cheek was from the mask breaking rather than any serious damage to his facial features, but she would take what she could get.

The mage stumbled back, covering his face, and when he pulled his hand back, part of the mask fell away. Annette could now see, rather than just feel, him staring at her, searching and furious. His eyes were a curious shade of gold, his eyelids rimmed with red. Not knowing what else to do, Annette put her fists up again, glaring at his almost-inhuman eye with an expression that dared him to come closer. She felt a strange satisfaction when he took a step back instead, although that was slightly dampened by the glow of magic growing steadily against his palm.

“Insignificant brat!” he snarled, pulling his hands together to draw out magic, a deep purple light flecked with black. “You had your chance to surrender. I think I’ll kill you last.”

“No!” Annette screamed, running forward, hands outstretched. If it hadn’t been for her, Felix wouldn’t even be here in the first place. She didn’t have a plan, other than needing to get in the way of the spell, or distract the mage, or take the hit herself.

A violent rush of wind knocked her backwards, and she fell to the ground, her knees giving out much faster than she would have liked. At first, she thought she actually had been hit with a dark magic spell, that she couldn’t feel pain because of the pure shock. But a shadow flickered overhead, and she barely had time to look up before the pegasus knight came crashing down. The lance flashed one, then twice, and the steel catching against the sun was all Annette could focus on amidst the flutter of wings and the screaming that was silenced with unnerving speed.

Ingrid had always been remarkably precise in her attacks.

Annette blinked up at the pegasus and her rider. Ingrid’s hair was loose around the edges of her braid, and her face was streaked with blood and dirt in a way that looked like she’d tried to wipe it away, but not very effectively. Her armor caught against the backdrop of the setting sun, and Annette felt she’d never in her life seen anyone look more like a knight from a storybook. Annette pulled herself to her feet, wobbling slightly but pleased to see that her legs seemed to still work, at the very least.

“Ingrid!” she croaked, giving her classmate a weak smile. Then, remembering her other classmate, who she had last left kneeling on the ground screaming after her, she whirled around. “Felix!” she said, a note of panic in her voice, and she gave a small squeak as she realized he was standing directly behind her. “Don’t sneak _up_ on me like that,” she snapped, crossing her arms and staring up at him. One of his eyes was puffy; she couldn't even remember why at this point.

“I didn’t – I’ve been yelling your name for the better part of the last fifteen minutes,” Felix grumbled, glaring at her. He crossed his arms, mirroring her defensive posture. “I told you not to cast any more spells,” he said crossly.

“I told you to stay down,” she replied with equal annoyance.

Felix glanced away from her, frowning, and Annette noticed a gash across his cheek she hadn’t seen before. Suddenly, stupidly, she felt her eyes filling with tears, and she threw her arms around his neck, burying her face against him as she pulled him down into a hug. She felt his whole body tense up, then he gingerly patted the back of her head a few times, one arm very lightly wrapping around her to pull her slightly closer. Annette squeezed her eyes shut and drew in a deep, ragged breath. She would have been content to stay like that a little bit longer, listening to his heartbeat and feeling her own, but Felix abruptly jerked forward, arms flying out and away from her, and Annette realized Ingrid had just smacked him on the back of the head.

“Stupid, useless, cocky _idiot_ ,” Ingrid snapped, and Annette stepped back quickly, suddenly wanting very much to put distance between her and Felix, both in terms of physical space and association. “You were supposed to meet Sylvain at the stables an _hour_ ago and I find you on the _roof_? And what did you do to Annette?” Ingrid stomped over to her and began fussing over injuries that Annette hadn’t even realized existed. She flung an accusatory glare at Felix. “You’re supposed to _protect_ the back line, Felix, not send them off to do your dirty work for you.”

Annette opened her mouth to protest, if not in Felix’s defense at least in her own, but Felix only laughed darkly and stepped away from the path of Ingrid’s gently batting hands.

“Nice of you to come back for us, Ingrid,” he said, rubbing the back of his head, which could not possibly be the part of him that hurt the most. “Never thought I’d see you break formation for someone as useless as me.”

“Idiot,” Ingrid muttered again, but she scarcely sounded angry this time, and Annette realized there was a ghost of a quiver in her voice. Ingrid hid this by stomping away from them both and looking over the edge of the roof. “So what’s the plan for getting out of here?” she asked, peering over the edge.

“I mean . . .flight?” Felix offered tentatively, flapping his arms slightly as Ingrid looked back around at him. She did not look amused. Felix winced. “Can your pegasus carry all three of us?”

To her credit, Ingrid gave the question a moment’s consideration, sizing Annette and Felix up and glancing at her pegasus briefly. But her answer was uncompromising when she shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not as far as we need to go. You need a horse.”

“Well then,” Felix said slowly. “I think I’d better finally make my way back to the stables.”

“If Sylvain is even still there,” Ingrid muttered grimly. “You missed your rendezvous, Fraldarius.”

“He’ll be there,” Felix said. “He probably got distracted flirting with a demonic beast or something. Probably hasn’t even made it there yet.”

“Right then,” Ingrid said. “Want me to fly you over to the stableyards?”

“No,” Felix interrupted her. Annette noticed the quick way his eyes flashed towards her for a moment, before he walked over to join Ingrid at the edge of the roof. She followed after. Her legs still felt wobbly. Felix pointed down a story, to an open window at the building across from them. “If you can get me there, that’ll lead me straight to the Great Hall. I can get to the stables from there, no problem.”

Ingrid shrugged. “Sounds good. Come on, let’s go.” She walked over to her pegasus. Felix turned to follow, and Annette stepped in his path, on hand latching onto his arm as he tried to walk by.

“That does _not_ sound good,” she said, glaring up at him. Felix raised his eyebrows as he looked down at her, a mixture of confusion and concern on his face.

“Listen, I don’t want you to be alone up here, either, but Ingrid will be right back,” he said in a tone he probably thought was soothing but Annette just took as bossy. “Anyone comes near you, just punch them again. She’ll be back in 5 minutes, tops.”

“ _That’s_ not the problem,” Annette snapped, her grip on his arm tightening. “What if there are – more of _them_? What if they find you when you’re heading to the stables?”

Felix shrugged, and shrugged her off in the process. “Then I stab them. Problem solved.”

“Felix.”

“Annette.”

“It’s not safe,” Annette said, and she could hear herself pouting but she didn’t care. “I don’t like it.”

“I’ll tell you what’s not safe,” Ingrid called, already on top of her pegasus, which trotted over to the two of them. “Staying here any longer than we have to. Come on.”

Felix looked up at Ingrid in surprise, like he’d forgotten she was there, and when he looked down at Annette, his eyes were softer. “This is the safest option for both of us,” he said, and he reached out towards her wrist, then pulled back, crossing his arms again. “You’ll be alone for five minutes up here; it’ll take me five minutes to get to the stables once Ingrid drops me off. We’re even.”

Annette frowned, unconvinced. “At least let me heal your shoulder before you go.”

“Annette,” Felix started, glancing down at her wrist again.

“Don’t,” Annette said shortly. “I’m gonna do it anyway.”

It was hard to trace the magic wound, which didn’t leave the same mark as a sword or arrow might have, so Annette made her best guess, placing one hand on the back of his shoulder and closing her eyes, feeling for the malevolent effects of magic as she called upon her own meager healing spells. She felt Felix grasp her other hand, his thumb resting on her Crest, but she focused her attention on channeling Faith magic towards the wound, finding the way to knit nerve and skin and muscle back together, even as the miasma spell continued to find ways to tear them apart.

She wasn’t sure she’d done a complete job, or even a very good job, when Felix jerked away, tugging on her wrist. The wave of pain followed shortly after, as if he’d predicted it, and Annette looked down to see her Crest glowing hotly around Felix’s hand, although Felix didn’t pull his thumb away.

“That’s enough of that,” he muttered. He looked down at Annette and dropped her hand, bringing it up to the back of his neck awkwardly. “Thank you,” he added. “I didn’t need it, but . . .thank you. Don’t use anymore magic until someone looks at that wrist, okay?”

“No promises,” Annette whispered. Felix grimaced, but Ingrid’s mount was now making impatient snorting noises, and Annette was rather worried Ingrid would soon follow suit, so she pushed him lightly towards Ingrid and took a step back. She was eager to get out of the way of a pegasus about to take flight.

“See you in a bit, Annette,” Ingrid called to her as Felix swung up on the pegasus behind her. “Felix, hold on until it’s time to jump.”

The pegasus was in the air before Annette could ask what that meant. It would have been safer for her to find one of those odd, jutting clock towers and flatten her back against it and stay in one place until Ingrid returned, but she suddenly very much needed to see what was happening.

She ran to the edge of the roof and watched Ingrid fly away, closing the gap between the two buildings. She flew in a wide circle, lower and lower with each rotation. They were too far away for Annette to hear them properly, but she could see the two of them bickering, arguing over some minutiae that mattered only to them, as if this were another day in class rather than a high-stakes acrobatic maneuver. But they finally flew close enough to the window, and even though Annette technically knew it was coming, she still covered her mouth to muffle a scream. Felix half-jumped, Ingrid half shoved him, but he somehow flew wildly off the pegasus through the open window, disappearing out of sight.

Watching the sight did not placate Annette in the slightest, although Ingrid didn’t look the least bit worried when she returned to the rooftop, neatly landing her pegasus in the same place it took off.

“How was that the safest option?” she demanded as Ingrid trotted over to her. “He could have fallen!”

Ingrid blinked at her in surprise. “It wasn’t really the _safest_ option, I guess,” she said mildly. “Just the fastest. He’s got a clear shot to the stables from there. Besides,” she added encouragingly. “It was a pretty big window.”

Annette glanced desperately over the ledge of the roof again, but it offered no answers. Felix was gone, disappeared towards whatever horse was going to get him out of Garreg Mach.

She looked back at Ingrid, who was looking at her more sympathetically than she had when she was hurrying their plan along.

“Don’t worry about Felix; he always lands on his feet,” Ingrid said kindly. She reached hand down and pulled Annette up onto the pegasus in front of her. “And you won’t always be around to protect him, now,” she added, her voice soft. Annette blamed the sudden stinging in her eyes on the wind whipping past them as Ingrid’s pegasus leapt into the air. She had no justification for why her cheeks grew so warm, but fortunately, Ingrid couldn’t see her face to ask follow-up questions.

She scanned the ground as they sped along, looking for any sign of – well, of any of her classmates, really. She wasn’t necessarily looking for anyone in particular. But she had to admit she felt adrenaline mixed with relief to see two horses streaking along the path below, even if she had no confirmation as to whom the riders were.

She closed her eyes after that, tucking herself closer to Ingrid and clutching the front of the saddle for balance. In every direction around them, Garreg Mach burned. Annette, eventually, could not stand to look anymore.

***

“Try a wind spell for me,” Manuela said. She added quickly, “Don’t cast it, dear, obviously!”

Annette nodded blearily. She called the most basic wind spell she knew to the tips of her fingers. The unformed magic cast an eerie green light along the walls of the makeshift infirmary tent, but the slight breeze was quite possibly welcome to the overworked clerics. It was stiflingly hot in the tent that evening.

Manuela nodded approvingly, and Annette could have cried for how much she wanted to see a professor nod approvingly right then. “Any pain?” she asked.

Annette shook her head.

Manuela reached over and grabbed a scalpel from her medical kit, and sliced her palm with a fortitude Annette envied. She held it out matter-of-factly. “Try healing this,” she instructed.

Annette did, easily enough, pressing her fingers lightly against the cut until there was nothing but newly formed skin. She glanced at her wrist tentatively. The Dominic crest stared back at her, imprinted on her skin the same as a freckle or a scar, but it no longer blinked wildly or flared up. It was just . . .there.

“Any pain?” Manuela interrupted, looking patiently up at Annette. Annette had tried to convince her to tend to other, more wounded patients, or to let Annette do the same, but Manuela had stayed by her side for over two hours, her eyes sharp and haunted. She patched up scrapes and bruises and sprains nonchalantly, but her deep frown as she ran her fingers across Annette’s crest could not be hidden by her cheerful follow up questions after every attempted treatment.

Annette shook her head. “No pain at all, Professor Manuela,” she said softly. “I’m just a little tired.”

“Well, you’ve had a long day,” Manuela said gently. She held Annette’s wrist in on hand, running her fingers over the Crest lightly. “I suspect the effects of the spell were temporary, obviously. To permanently rearrange the configuration of a Crest would be – well, you would need weeks, if not years. But try out a full-fledged wind spell before you head home, and let me know if there’s any pain. You wouldn’t want anything to happen to you on the journey home.”

“Right,” Annette said absently, pulling her wrist back and cradling it in her other hand. The journey home. They really weren’t going back to Garreg Mach. And if something happened to her on the road back to Dominic, she wouldn’t be able to run back to her Sorcery professor for help. She wouldn’t be able to run to anyone.

Manuela was still frowning at her, and Annette wasn’t sure if it was thoughtful or concerned or disappointed. “You said this was Empire mages that did this to you?” she repeated. Annette’s explanation had been rather garbled, after Ingrid had half-dragged, half-carried her to the infirmary and demanded in her most authoritative voice to speak to the highest ranking healer possible. Manuela continued, “And it was on the monastery grounds, not on the battlefield?”

“The lib – the library, yes,” Annette stumbled. She got shaky when she thought about it. “And I assumed they were with the Empire; they weren’t from Garreg Mach. They didn’t wear Imperial armor or mention Edelgard, but –”

“Black robes, you said? And masks?” Manuela asked. Annette nodded. Manuela stood, dusting her hands off. “I think the Archbishop will want to hear about what happened to you, Annette,” she said, her voice solemn if sympathetic. “And possibly Professor Byleth. I don’t believe they’ve returned from the front lines yet, but when they do –” She cut off, and looked down at Annette. “I’ll be happy to go with you to talk to them,” she added, holding out a hand and helping Annette off the flimsy infirmary cot. “For now, perhaps dinner and bed? We’ll worry about all that tomorrow.”

Annette wandered out of the healer’s tent and into the campsite in a daze. They’d made camp a few miles from Garreg Mach, but it was too far out of the way for it to be worth the trouble for the Empire to follow after them, and enough Knight of Seiros stood guard along the perimeter that they would have time to flee further north if necessary. The camp was an ad hoc affair, nothing compared to the neat rows of matching tents they stayed in when they traveled for battles. A mash of wagons and campfires and makeshift tents formed a loose circle around a central hub, and Annette quickly got lost among the chaos.

She still had no idea how many of her classmates had made it out alive, although she had run into Mercie in the healer’s tent, working herself to death, and Manuela had shooed Ashe away as he yelled over his shoulder that he’d save her some dinner. Through the campfire smoke she spotted Dimitri sitting on a wagon at the edge of camp, staring ahead blankly as Dedue stood by him. It was astonishing, really, how lucky they were all, that any of them had made it out alive. Annette’s stomach still twisted at the possibility that some of them _didn’t_ make it out alive, and her nerves weren’t soothed as she scanned the perimeter of the camp, looking for corners or out-of-the-way shadows where antisocial loners might be likely to lurk. She found only shadows, and she felt her shoulders slump as she turned away from the central camp fire to try to find the tent Mercie had told her was set up for them.

“Annette!”

Annette turned towards her name. Felix was running after her, weaving through wagons and clusters of soldiers. He’d found a change of clothes, although it still seemed to be the standard-issue school uniform, and he’d at some point managed to fix his hair so it no longer hung in his eyes. He was back to the sharp, immaculate swordmaster from the training grounds and front lines, and Annette almost felt foolish to talk to him with her scorched and ripped uniform and her hair falling in a mess around her shoulders. But then he slammed into a soldier and gave him a dirty look as if it was the soldiers fault, and as he got closer Annette realized he still had a scratch across his eyebrow, somehow, and he was Felix again and she was so happy to see him she could have sung.

He skidded to a stop next to her, and she looked up at him, trying to smile or maybe trying to hide how much she was smiling. She raised her eyebrows expectantly, waiting for him to say something, but he didn’t. He opened his mouth and then closed it, and they stared at each other for a silent, frozen moment.

“You found a horse,” Annette said finally.

Felix gave a short laugh. “Yeah, I did,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck and looking away. “Sylvain was still waiting for me, after all. Idiot doesn’t know when to cut his losses.”

Annette smiled wider. “He really cares about you, huh?” she asked. Felix rolled his eyes.

“Like I can’t saddle my own horse,” he muttered. His eyes flicked back at her, and he clearly was trying to size her up, or psych himself up, but he failed at both. “How’s your wrist?” he finally asked, an inevitable question.

“Better,” Annette said. She held up her arm, pulling back her sleeve to reveal her Crest, although it was perhaps too dark to see it. “See? Not glowing. I’m glad. I imagine being a permanent nightlight would have made sleeping difficult.”

Felix squinted down at her arm in the firelight, and his hand hovered over her wrist for a moment, but he quickly pulled away and crossed his arms, taking a step back as he did so. “I'm glad to see you’re alright,” he mumbled. “I was . . . concerned. For a bit there. It would have been, um,” he paused, his gaze flickering away from Annette entirely. “It would have been difficult to escape if you hadn’t been there.”

Annette tried to smile, at this, partially because it looked like it was so painful for him to admit it and partially because it was a really nice thing to say. But it was hard to smile thinking back anything that afternoon – the broken glass cutting at her arms or Felix collapsing next to her or the golden, ruthless eyes that stared out from behind a broken mask.

Felix was kind enough to pretend to mistake her shudder for the cold. “I’ve, um, Ingrid and Sylvain had a fire going by our tents,” he said. “If you want.”

Even this far south, the nights were cold, and both the fire and the company were a welcome contrast to curling up in a dark tent and waiting for sleep to come. Ashe followed through on his promise of food, and Annette found she was actually hungry once she started eating. There were none of the jokes or smiles or even arguments of their usual evening gatherings. Even Sylvain was remarkably silent, the firelight catching in his eyes as he stared, practically unblinking, offering the occasional dark joke about ladies loving a man with battle scars as Ingrid fretted over the entire group’s unhealed injuries. After a battle that vicious, the infirmary healed the wounds that were most likely to kill you and you powered through the others – there weren’t enough healers to help your black eye, not when someone else was bleeding out in the bed beside you. Annette felt a pang of guilt that she had taken up so much of Professor Manuela’s time. Ashe’s arm was in a sling, and Sylvain limped when Ingrid finally stood up and announced she was going to bed, dragging him after her and leaving him beside his tent before she disappeared into hers.

If Sylvain was quiet that evening, Felix might as well have been dead. He sat next to Annette, not talking, not laughing, not even looking at her. Annette snuck occasional glances at him, tallying up his own injuries in the firelight – his slightly swollen eye, the cut across his cheek, the way he winced if he turned towards someone too quickly. When he turned towards her, she looked away.

She should have gone to bed early, like Ingrid, but Mercedes would be up half the night in the infirmary, and the idea of being alone in a tent was awful enough that Annette stayed until the fire was burned down to embers, and the camp was finding its way to quiet, and it was only her and Felix sitting next to the fire, on a log he had dragged from goddess-knew-where in order to provide makeshift seating. Every time she thought about leaving, she changed her mind. Every time she thought about speaking, the words stuck in her throat.

It was Felix who spoke first, for once, and she almost thought she’d dreamed it, he spoke so softly.

“Who were they, Annette?”

Annette looked over at him, surprised out of her waking nightmare of recounting the day's events. He kept his gaze straight ahead, his own eyes golden in the firelight, but in a way that was warm and human and worried and nothing like the glittering gold from the mage.

“They couldn’t have been from the Empire,” he continued, still not looking at her. “The Imperial Army is brutal, efficient, well-trained – but they’re not this. Kidnapping and torture and looting and – who _were_ they, Annette?” He looked over at her now, frowning down at her. “What did they want with you?”

“I don't know,” Annette said, her voice small. “They talked about . . . Crests, and power, and experiments. They treated me like I was, well, not valuable, but interesting? A curiosity? Or maybe valuable, but not . . . human.”

“An insect,” Felix said suddenly. “He called you an insect.”

“They both did,” Annette said. She could still hear the woman in the library saying it, almost like a term of endearment, as she peered down at Annette with a sneer on her face.

“It seems so familiar,” Felix muttered, almost to himself. “I've _seen_ them before. I just don’t understand what they have to do with –” he cut himself off and looked back at Annette. “Where are you going after this?” he asked suddenly, and the subject change threw her off guard.

“Um, to bed?” she offered, and realized as soon as she said it that of course that wasn’t what he meant. “You mean tomorrow? I guess I’ll find a way home.”

“To Dominic?” Felix clarified, although Annette of course didn’t mean Garreg Mach.

Annette shrugged. “I think Mercie is planning to head to a church somewhere north; it’ll be safe to travel with the knights of Seiros. If I go with her, they’d probably give me sanctuary until I can send a letter to my uncle, let him know where I am. If he sends an escort I’m sure the trip back would be –”

“Come to Fraldarius,” Felix said, grabbing her hand.

“What?” Annette said, jerking back in surprise. Felix dropped her hand, blushing, but he didn’t look away. Annette stared up at him, blinking.

“Or Fhirdiad,” he said quickly. “I’ll probably be there in the summers, depending on how far north the war spreads, and I’m sure the bo – Dimitri and Dedue will be there year round. But Fraldarius – it’s close to the capital, it’s far away from the southern border, you could stay as long as you want, or until the war is over.”

“Felix – _Felix._ ” And now Annette was grabbing his hand, because once he’d started talking it was like a dam had burst inside him and she could get a word in edgewise. She didn’t let go when he looked down at her in surprise. “Dominic is my home,” she said with a gentle smile. “I can’t just not go home. They need me.”

Felix’s hand tightened around hers. “Who were those men, Annette?” he whispered. “What did they want with you?”

“The Empire’s focus will be on the eastern territories around Garreg Mach,” Annette said. Narrowing her eyes, she added, “And if they come anywhere near western Faerghus, you can bet I’ll be the first one to sign up to fight against them.”

“That . . . doesn’t make me feel better at all,” Felix mumbled.

“Hypocrite,” Annette said, and she tried to smile at him, but he looked away. She squeezed his hand. “I’ll be safe in Dominic, Felix. I just, um, have to get there.”

Felix looked back sharply. “I’ll take you,” he said, and he sounded almost eager. “Sylvain and I are escorting Ingrid to Galatea. We could just head straight west from there, it wouldn’t be out of your way at all. If you won’t come with me to Fraldarius, at least let me take you to Dominic.”

Annette blushed and looked away. Felix cared little for social norms; he was as reckless and impulsive in his court life as he was careful and precise on the battlefield. She couldn’t go around asking the heir of Fraldarius to act as a simple escort. “You know,” she said shyly, changing the subject herself. “You should be asking _me_ to be your escort, at this point. I’m pretty good at throwing a punch.”

Felix actually chuckled at this, and for once Annette was pretty sure he wasn’t laughing at her. “In my defense,” he said. “That was my first suggestion.”

“Just so we’re clear on who’s protecting who,” Annette said.

“So is that a yes?” Felix asked, and the note of hope in his voice made Annette’s heart hurt, a bit. He was a hypocrite; he’d be on the front lines against the Empire by next month at the latest.

“That’s an I’ll-think-about it,” she said solemnly. She yawned, starting to cover her mouth and then realizing Felix was still clutching her hand. She slumped against him. “After some sleep. I’ll sleep, and then I’ll think about it,” she said, putting her life in order as she always did, a neat line of steps to complete to delay the inevitable disaster creeping up behind her. 

“Yeah, it’s been, um, not the best day,” Felix said. “I guess you’d better head to bed, huh?”

“Mmm,” Annette agreed.

Felix didn’t move. Neither did Annette.

Leaning into his right arm, Annette’s was a bit confused why she could hear his heartbeat so clearly, until she realized it was his Crest, vaguely thrumming with life every second of every day, whether he heard it or knew it or wanted it or not. She wondered, as Felix slid his thumb down her hand to rest on her wrist again, whether he could feel her pulse twice as strongly against her own Crest.

Annette could have fallen asleep then. Perhaps Felix thought she had; he didn’t say anything for a long time after that. But as tired as she was, as warm as the fire was, as strangely comforting as Felix’s thumb against her pulse was, Annette found she couldn’t even close her eyes. Instead, she stared at the horizon, where the fires around Garreg Mach still burned, smoke on the skyline and a faint glow in the distance. And between prayers for the fallen and fears for the future and longing nostalgia for a year that already seemed like another person’s life, Annette never really found sleep that night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading the thrilling conclusion! Don't forget to head over to chapter 2 to see soulty's amazing art! (Although how'd you get chapter 3 without reading chapter 2? Read things in order, you weirdo!) And thanks to the organizers of this minibang for putting together such a fun event!


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